[council] "Liaison Statement from the IAB to the ICANN Board on Technical Use of Domain Names"

[Bruce Tonkin <Bruce.Tonkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From:  http://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1351/


Liaison Statement: Liaison Statement from the IAB to the ICANN Board on 
Technical Use of Domain Names 

Submission Date: 2014-09-15
From: The IAB (Russ Housley)  

We are writing this note in order to share with you some work in the IETF 
regarding domain names for "technical use," as described in RFC 2860.

In RFC 2860 ("Memorandum of Understanding Concerning the Technical Work of the 
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority," June 2000), the IAB acknowledged the 
authority of ICANN for policies relating to the assignment of domain names, but 
retained authority over "assignments of domain names for technical use" 
(Section 4.3, pg 2):


"4.3. Two particular assigned spaces present policy issues in addition  to the 
technical considerations specified by the IETF:

 the assignment  of domain names, and 

the assignment of IP address blocks. 

These  policy issues are outside the scope of this MOU. 
 
Note that 

(a) assignments of domain names for technical uses (such as  domain names for 
inverse DNS lookup), 

(b) assignments of specialised address blocks (such as multicast or anycast 
blocks), and 

(c)  experimental assignments 

are not considered to be policy issues, and shall remain subject to the 
provisions of this Section 4."

In order to support appropriate technical use of domain names in the context of 
its protocol development work, the IETF approved RFC 6761 ("Special-Use Domain 
Names," February 2013).  As directed, IANA established and populated a registry 
for such special-use names 
(http://www.iana.org/assignments/special-use-domain-names/special-use-domain-names.xhtml
 ).

Recently, several requests have come to the IETF for names to be added to the 
special-use domain names registry
(See:
http://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-chapin-additional-reserved-tlds-01.txt

and
http://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names-02.txt 
).

Discussion of these requests under the process established in RFC 6761 has 
revealed difficulties in applying its guidelines in practice.
Under its current charter, the DNSOP working group in the IETF is responsible 
to review and clarify the overlap between (among other
things) the special names registry from RFC 6761 and the public DNS root.  This 
could include consideration of the problem of existing name collisions, 
provision of additional guidelines, or further modification to the process in 
RFC 6761 to reduce the potential for collisions in the future.  Any changes are 
to be kept within the constraints of RFC 2860 (or any future modification to 
RFC 2860).

All such discussion and any modification will be open and transparent to 
participation by interested parties, in accordance with established IETF 
processes.  We invite participation of interested parties, including members of 
the ICANN community, in this work.

On behalf of the IAB,
Russ Housley
IAB Chair